Ugh. From the "surely you can't be serious" file, the Los Angeles Times is seriously comparing Michael Moore to Orson Welles (see THE BIG PICTURE: Michael Moore: Showman, satirist, journalist, provocateur).
Moore also reminds Greengrass of another larger-than-life filmmaker. "There is something Wellesian about him," he says. "He has this preposterous, overblown persona that you can't help but get involved with. He has the showmanship as well as the delight Welles had in getting a rise out of people. He's also a technically brilliant filmmaker, even if you sometimes wonder — am I really getting the whole picture?"
Unlike previous generations of documentarians, who largely remained unseen behind the camera, Moore is always front and center, playing the blue-collar rube. With his signature baseball cap and shambling gait, he looks like Vince Vaughn's tubby older brother, the guy who lingers over an extra slice of pie at your local coffee shop. Moore casts himself as a wide-eyed naif, full of sympathy for the poor loser who can only afford to have one of the fingers he cuts off with a power saw reattached.
Just because they were both fat filmmakers doesn't even put them on the same playing field. I don't even need to list the many reasons Moore doesn't deserve to even be called a "documentarian". The difference is that Citizen Kane is AFI's number one film. Each year that passes after one of Moore's releases, the film loses creditability as it's debunked, omitted facts are exposed, and participants begin to sue. The only similarity in the films of Welles and Moore is they are both fiction.
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